A Historical and Bibliometric Analysis of the Development of Agile

Introduction

“Project management” can be defined as a series of activities and processes performed as part of a project by a defined set of people, from same or different areas with the aim of generating new or improved organizational products, services, and/or processes (Jrad and Sundaram, 2015). In this chapter, we discuss agile project management. This is a method of project management focused on collaboration and frequent communication. Project management techniques should help the chances of project success. In the early years of software development, project failure was too common, resulting in the development of structured approaches that sought to ensure successes. Traditional structured approaches to software project management, sometimes referred to as the systems development life cycle or the waterfall method, became accepted practice. As these structured methods became standard practice, software project failure remained high and experts recognized that such a dynamic environment may require rethinking software development management. Agile methods then took the assumption that all requirements cannot be known at project initiation and that the dynamic business and technology environments will cause change during the project.

Agile software development was formalized as a methodology in 2001 with the creation of the Agile Manifesto. It refers to a set of computer programming methodologies that emphasize flexibility, collaboration, efficiency, simplicity, and most of all, delivering working products to end users within short timeframes (Codington-Lacerte, 2018). However, as time has passed, agile principles have spread into additional industries including general project management. According to Hayat (2019) almost every software company uses agile development, particularly Scrum, and these companies have experienced many positive results from its use.

This chapter starts with a brief history of Software Development from a summary of traditional approaches and presents the arguments made for agile approaches and the eventual widespread acceptance of Scrum. We then compare the narrative to the bibliometric analysis of abstract records that can be found in the Web of Science database. Finally, we consider the future of Agile-Scrum in light of the current pandemic.